The take away party

by Rob Howard
Political Columnist

Ever since Donald Trump entered the GOP presidential sweepstakes, most writers have focused on his assertion that he would deport 11 million undocumented aliens from our country. To Trump, it’s just another management problem. No attention to the cost of doing it, the cost to our economy of losing that many consumers, or the emotional upheaval of uprooting people from their homes.

But almost as bad as that outrageous proposal is, there are proposals that would harm millions more Americans. And it’s not just Trump who is proposing these things, it’s pretty much the whole Republican field that wants to take things away from millions of people.

First on the list is overturning the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision. Ted Cruz and Ben Carson have pledged to void all gay marriages. The others are against same-sex marriage. There is a wide variety of estimates of how many married same-sex couples there are, although just before the Obergefell decision, the Washington Post ran a story saying Gallup estimated there were 390,000 married same-sex couples in the US. The Post guessed that the total could rise to half a million after a decision that extended marriage equality nationwide.

So, I’ll go with that. If Cruz and his buddies were successful, one million LGBT citizens, and countless tens of thousands of their children, would lose the economic and legal security that comes with marriage. No more right to inheritance, to getting health insurance on your spouse’s employer. No more right to make decisions for your children if you don’t have the right paperwork. No more making decisions for your spouse’s healthcare if she can’t make them.

The economic carnage of reversing same-sex marriage would be a disaster to LGBT couples, to say nothing of the emotional distress. Yet this is the consequence of the GOP field’s political posturing.

But the carnage doesn’t stop with LGBT rights. The thrust of the whole Republican party has been to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Only Ohio Gov. John Kasich, among the presidential contenders, expanded Medicaid to bring health insurance to over 580,000 Ohioans. Over 234,000 more bought insurance through the federal exchange.

Those 814,000 people are part of the 16.4 million people that have gained insurance coverage through the affordable care act. 2.9 million more do not have coverage because their states did not expand Medicaid. 26 percent of those are in Cruz’s Texas, and 20 percent more are in Bush and Rubio’s Florida.

The financial disaster visited upon the 2.9 million currently uninsured is terrible. Think what would happen if those covered under Obamacare lost their insurance coverage.

Another hot button for the GOP candidates and their base is defunding Planned Parenthood. The organization works in all 50 states, and serves over 2.8 million people a year. More than half their clinics are in rural or medically-underserved areas.

The affiliates of Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) receive $528.4 million in government reimbursements and grants, about 75 percent of which was reimbursement for serving patients enrolled in Medicaid. Are you seeing a connection to the ACA here? Good.  

PPFA receives no federal funds. Only three percent of all Planned Parenthood health services are abortion services; federal law prohibits federal funds from being used for abortion except for rape, incest or the life of the mother, and Planned Parenthood is diligent in following that law.

Federal funds from Title X, the nation’s family planning program, go toward the care of 1.5 million patients a year. This is the only way that many who are uninsured, or who’ve fallen through the cracks, have access to services. In fact, 6 in 10 women who receive care from Planned Parenthood consider it their main source of health care.

Yet the GOP wants to take this important source of family planning, reproductive health, and women’s healthcare away from poor families, many of whom can’t rely on Medicaid because of GOP opposition to the ACA.

Another ‘take away’ is voter suppression. Through the passage of stringent voter ID laws, millions of registered voters, and those who are qualified to register, are not allowed to vote because they don’t have the required government photo ID.

In Ted Cruz’s Texas alone, 600,000 registered voters are unable to vote because of Texas’ new ID law. These laws are mainly aimed against the poor, and minorities, who tend to vote for Democrats instead of Republicans. They are designed to keep control of Congress, state and local government in the hands of the GOP.

The Republican party, at every turn, tries to take things away from people; instead of making our lives better, they make them worse. I don’t know which of these is the most despicable: the idea of uprooting 11 million immigrants and deporting them, taking marriage rights away from same-sex couples, cancelling the health insurance of over 16 million, or taking away preventative healthcare from the 2.8 million patients served by Planned Parenthood.

But we don’t have to choose. The Republican candidates for President of the United States want to do it all. They are the ‘take away’ party, and they like that just fine.

The Gayly - 2/28/2016 @ 8:25 a.m. CST